Opportunistic Wiretapping/Jamming: A New Attack Model in Millimeter-Wave Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel opportunistic wiretapping and jamming attack model in millimeter-wave wireless networks, showing it can significantly compromise security more than traditional attacks.

Contribution

It proposes the OWJ attack model, develops approximation techniques for node distributions, and derives analytical expressions for secrecy capacity under this new threat.

Findings

OWJ attack can more severely degrade network security.

Analytical models accurately characterize node distributions.

Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of OWJ attacks.

Abstract

While the millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is robust against the conventional wiretapping attack due to its short transmission range and directivity, this paper proposes a new opportunistic wiretapping and jamming (OWJ) attack model in mmWave wireless networks. With OWJ, an eavesdropper can opportunistically conduct wiretapping or jamming to initiate a more hazardous attack based on the instantaneous costs of wiretapping and jamming. We also provide three realizations of the OWJ attack, which are mainly determined by the cost models relevant to distance, path loss and received power, respectively. To understand the impact of the new attack on mmWave network security, we first develop novel approximation techniques to characterize the irregular distributions of wiretappers, jammers and interferers under three OWJ realizations. With the help of the results of node distributions, we then derive analytical expressions for the secrecy transmission capacity to depict the network security performance under OWJ. Finally, we provide extensive numerical results to illustrate the effect of OWJ and to demonstrate that the new attack can more significantly degrade the network security performance than the pure wiretapping or jamming attack.